Other programs, which earn their developers lots and lots of money, appear
to do much worse even after years and
years of effort.

Disclaimer: Okay, ExchangeIt 1.0 was kind of bad, but it was a 1.0. And
okay, I'm still not sure why we decided to write a high-performance,
high-reliability network server application in perl. But we actually made
it work in the end. I'm kind of impressed.